‘How badly can we mess up kindergarten?’

Ryan was ready to read, but the public school didn’t teach reading in kindergarten. So Paula Bolyard and her husband decided to homeschool for a year, thinking, “How badly can we mess up kindergarten?” Bolyard recalls her 14 years of homeschooling in PJ Media Lifestyle.

Though I had no training in teaching or pedagogy (I had never even heard the word pedagogy), I taught Ryan to read using a boxed reading program with phonics songs on cassette tapes (a-a apple, b-b-ball, c-c-cat, and d-d-doll…).

Ryan was reading by Christmas. The Bolyards decided they couldn’t do much harm in first grade. They kept going, adding Ryan’s brother when he was old enough.

We came to believe that this was the best possible educational choice for our children. They were not only growing academically, but socially and spiritually we saw signs of the budding maturity we desired in them.

There were no “matching, hand-sewn outfits and freshly baked bread every day,” she writes. “We worked through learning disabilities and speech therapy” and what the family now calls “Algebra with Anger.”

But then I have a picture in my mind of my precious boys snuggled up with me on the couch as I’m reading Johnny Tremain to them. . . . The American Revolution is jumping off the pages and coming to life for them as Johnny helps Paul Revere warn that the British are coming! We have already read a couple chapters from the Bible that day, a chapter from a missionary biography, and have worked on memorizing Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If.”

Later in the afternoon the boys are scheduled to do some independent reading, work on a science lab (growing radishes), and complete their math lessons. But for now, they beg me to keep reading Johnny Tremain — and because we are homeschoolers, we have the freedom to keep reading all afternoon if we want to. And we do, because I want to know what happens to Johnny and Paul Revere.

“Parents, who love and understand their children better than anyone else in the world, are well-qualified to educate their children at home and should seriously consider taking on the challenge,” concludes Bolyard.